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The Joy of Creation

Nothing is quite as satisfying as finishing a project that you’ve been working on for some time, especially if its been sitting on your desk for a while – important but not urgent. For me, that has been adding Feedly integration to FeedSpider over the last week or so. That is now complete, and I am just waiting for the guys over at Feedly to push my new client id to production so that I can release the app. (As a bonus, I also added support for BazQux Reader. It only took about half an hour thanks to their very Google-like API.)

The biggest challenge was implementing OAuth support (detailed in my last post), but between a few false starts with AOL reader, which requires the same technology, and work piling up at my day job, I got it done. The rest of the project was merely tweaking the app to support Feedly’s API, which is Google-like, but just different enough to create it’s own challenges, especially on the platform that I’m working on. And now, that’s finished too.

While I can’t take credit for building the app from the ground up, (Darrin Holst did an excellent job of architecting it), I have done some significant tinkering under the hood, and am very proud of reworking the API and login/credential layers so that the app can properly and easily handle multiple providers with different requirements. This was aptly demonstrated by how easy is was to integrate BazQux Reader. I just had to drop in a new app API, and add the service to the service list. No other changes required.

One of the things that I love about programming is the feeling of having built something, even if it’s just a bunch of bits. It gives you a certain satisfaction and an energy that can’t be duplicated – make you feel like you can take on the world, and makes you feel ready to go energetically into the next project. That’s something that’s feels like its missing nowadays – and why I intend to keep programming and building computers and systems for many years to come.